bronner and shulman a cloud turned goose' : sanskrit in the vernacular millennium

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Indian Economic & Social

http://ier.sagepub.com/content/43/1/1The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/001946460504300101

2006 43: 1Indian Economic Social History ReviewYigal Bronner and David Shulman

'A Cloud Turned Goose' : Sanskrit in the vernacular millennium

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Sanskrit in the vernacular millennium/1

A Cloud Turned Goose:

Sanskrit in the vernacular millennium

Yigal Bronner

South Asian Languages and Civilizations

University of Chicago, Illinois

David Shulman

Department of Indian Studies

Hebrew University, Jerusalem

A vast corpus of Sanskrit poetry (kvya) was produced over the last thousand years; most ofthese works reveal a vital and organic relation to the crystallising regional traditions of thesubcontinent and to emerging vernacular literatures. Thus we have, for example, the Sanskritliteratures of Kerala, of Bengal-Orissa, of Andhra, and so on. These works, often addressed

primarily to local audiences, have remained largely unknown and mostly undervalued, despitetheir intrinsic merits and enormous importance for the cultural history of India. We explorethe particular forms of complex expressivity, including rich temporal and spatial modalities,

apparent in such poems, focusing in particular on Vednta Deikas Ham.

sasandea, afourteenth-century messenger-poem modelled after Klidsas Meghasandea. We hypothesisea principle: as localisation increases, what is lost in geographical range is made up for byincreasing depth. Sanskrit poetry thus comes to play a critical, highly original role in theelaboration of regional cultural identities and the articulation of innovative cultural thematics;a re-conceptualised ecology of Sanskrit genres, including entirely new forms keyed to localexperience, eventually appears in each of the regions. In short, rumours of the death of Sanskritafter 1000 A.D. are greatly exaggerated.

Why would a seventeenth-century poet in some small village of south India writean elaborate poem in Sanskrit, of all (Indian) languages? He or she could just as

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 43, 1 (2006)

SAGE New Delhi/Thousand Oaks/LondonDOI: 10.1177/001946460504300101

Acknowledgements: We wish to thank the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and theInstitute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University for supporting the 2005 Summer Academyon Regional Sanskrit. Our thanks to all participants in the Summer Academy for their comments,corrections and insights.

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2 / YIGAL BRONNER and DAVID SHULMAN

easily compose the work in a spoken language such as Tamil or Telugu, whichhave fully articulated literary traditions, an entire world of poetic theory, a richgenre-ecology, and a long history. If, nonetheless, our poet chooses Sanskritas

so many didwhat is the meaning of this choice?We may gain some insight into this set of questions from a section about poetsand poetic praxis in Vekadhvarins Vivagudara-camp, The Mirror ofAll Qualities, a seventeenth-century Sanskrit text composed somewhere nearK cipuram. TheMirroris structured as an ongoing conversation between twoflying gandharvas, Knu and Vivvasu; the former is a rather grumpy observerwho finds fault in everything he sees, whereas the latter is the eternal optimist,with something good to say about whatever Knu has denounced.1 They are on

an aerial tour of southern India, especially the Tamil region. Towards the end ofthe tour, after they have thoroughly investigated the geography of southern India,including some apt observations about the new city of Madras (Georgetown) withits foreign residents (veta-has), they allow themselves some general obser-vations about various professions and identities (doctors, grammarians, logicians,astrologersand poets).

As usual, Knu begins with an acerbic comment:

There are lovely wordsfit to be turned into poetrythat praises God.Poets, alas, enslave themto petty, crooked kings.Would anyone in his right mindgo to the end of the world

to fetch a libation for the godfrom the heavenly Gangesand then use it to waterhis vegetables?2

God exists. He frees thosewho praise him. Still, poetswaste their fine phrases

singing about whores.

1 See Narayana Rao, et al., Symbols of Substance.2Vivagudara-camp 542:

r-ntha-stavannurpa-kavanm.

vm mano-hrimkaam

.

h kavaya kadarya-kuila-km-pla-stkurvate/drophta-saura-saindhava-payo devbhiekocitamsam

.

seke viniyujate sumataya klavlasya kim//



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Its like a vulgar kingwho uses pearls that belongon Gods crown to adorn

his pet bitch.

3

Knu may well be speaking about Sanskrit when he mentions the Ganges waterbrought from afar. So language, v, that is of this statusand that is also charm-ing, manohriis really limited to highly specific, religious contexts. Any otheruse is debasing, a kind of prostitution. Thus the author, Vekadhvarin, has actuallyinserted a potentially self-critical remark into his text through the mouth of Knu,who also happens to be, not surprisingly, a realist of sorts. Poets like this authordo use Sanskrit for purposes other than composing stotras.

Vivvasu immediately acknowledges this truth in verses that could be seenas the authors self-defence or apology: there are, he grants his opponent, poetswhose words are entirely fruitless, aphala. On the other hand, descriptions ofwomen and kings are entirely appropriate if they appear in the context of kvyathat cele-brates Ka, for example. He cites honourable precedents: one can findsuch passages in the works of Vysa and Vlmki (54445). Context matters.This defence only paves the way for Knus second burst of criticism, this timea more general and principled one: the real problem lies in the fact that poetswaste their talent in praising ordinary human beings, nara-stuti. Those who knowthe stras will always find this practice appalling.

At this point Vivvasuor perhaps it is Vekadhvarin himself who is speak-ing through himproduces a highly specific and elaborate response. There is, hesays, no reason to single out poets in this respect:

When poets praise kings,they often produce exquisite verse.

Others praise such menwith empty words that have no punch.Thats the whole difference:the fault of praising human beingsis universal, while a poethas, at least, a special power.4

3

Ibid. 543.stuvad-bhava-nivartake sati harau kavi sktibhikaroti vara-varin-carita-varanam

.

garhitam/antir avan-patir gha-un-tanum

.

mauktikairvibhayati devat-mukua-bhga-yogyair yath//

4Vivagudara-camp 547:

padyair hdyatamai stuvanti kavaya pryea pthv-patnanye tn stuvate vacobhir acamat-krair asrair api/

padyrambhaa-akty-aakti-vihito bheda kavnm.

bhavatyanyem

.

ca param.

nara-stuti-kto doas tu srvatrika//



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Vsvvasu resists the attempt to confine poetry to stotra. In effect, what is atissue is the poets freedom. Even mundane subjectseven panegyriccan beelevated and enlivened by a skillful poet. The categoric identification of any patron-

client relationship as prostitution misses the mark; it is too sweeping, and as suchultim-ately irrelevant to what the poet really does. Moreover, the medium of poetryallows communication with several sets of distinguished predecessors:

The classical masters of poetryVlmki, Vysa, Parara and othersare universally admired.People who recognize quality

should also respond with respectto the new crop of great poetsfor their service to the world.5

Mgha, the Thief,6 Mayra, Murri, Bhravi who knew the essence,rhara, Klidsathe poetBhavabhti, King Bhoja,r Dain, iima, Vednta Deika, Bhallaa, Bhaa Ba,and other equally well-known poets (think of Subandhu)

make everybody happy with their poems. (549)7

The poet who rolled in the dust of the devotees feet [T araip i],Viucitta [P riy lvr],the sage ahakopa [Nammlvr],Bhtattlvr,Madhurakavi,and quite a few other great souls

dont they make the worlds purewith their flowing sweet words? (551)8

5Ibid. 548:

prcetasa-vysa-parardy prca kavndr jagad-acits te/goh navnpi mah-kavnm

.

pjy gua-jair bhuvanopakartr//

6 = Bilhaa.7mgha coro mayro mura-ripur aparo bhravi sra-vid yarhara klidsa kavir atha bhavabhtyhvayo bhojarja/rda iimkhya ruti-mukua-gurur bhallao bhaa-bakhyt cnye subandhv-daya iha ktibhir vivam hldayanti//

8praata-caraa-reu-viu-citta aha-mathana-raso muni sa bhta/madhura-kavir ito pare dhany kati na punanti jaganti skti-prai//



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These three verses direct us to at least three authoritative literary canons. Thefirst comprises, as is usually the case with praise of previous poets, 9 the pair ofgreat epic poets Vysa and Vlmki, the latter seen as the First Poet, di-kavi.

Next comes what initially seems to be a conventional list of classical Sanskritpoets; but in the middle of this set we suddenly find a shift southwards to includeiima, who belongs to the high Vijayanagara period, and then the outstandingfigure of Vednta Deika (ruti-mukua-guru, thirteenth century), a foundationalfigure in the world of south Indian regional Sanskritas we will argue at lengthbelow. This merging of two local figures with the great classical names of Klidsa,Mgha, Ba and others is not a trivial matter. The third verse takes us into thervaiava Tamil bhakti canon, naming (or renaming in Sanskrit) five of the

12 lvrs. Note that the Sanskrit poets make everybody happy while Tamilbhakti poets make the worlds pure. In between the second and third verses isanother one, which we have not translated, that speaks of the intimate relation(smndhikarayam) of various pairs of qualities, including, conspicuously,shitya, literature, and pitya, erudition. The reference is, most probably, toalakra-stra, the science of poetics, another highly relevant canon.

This is the end of the debate between the two gandharvas about the merits anddemerits of poets. We have cited it as an initial answer to the question we posed atthe outset. Composing poetry in Sanskrit in seventeenth-century Tamil Nadu means,among other things, positioning oneself in relation to these wider literary universes:pan-Indian epics, cosmopolitan and local Sanskrit kvya, scientific Sanskrit dis-course, and vernacular poetry. A poet always faces the danger of being confinedin a single, limited identity. This, in fact, is just what Knu argues: a poet eitherinhabits the temple and puts the pearls that belong on gods crown where theybelong, or he is entirely enslaved to petty, crooked kings. But Vivvasus defence

allows the poet to transcend this dichotomy. Poetry has a wider scope. In fact,Vekadhvarin in effect offers an implicit rationale for the special role of Sanskritin this context. Sanskrit enables a unique connectedness of the various domains.It opens up a certain space and offers the poet a kind of freedom. In these verses,we find again and again words such asjagat,jaganti, bhuvana, viva, all conveyinga sense of a worldwide potential. Even a highly local milieu allows a skilled poetto dig deep, to tap into these underlying currents.

What is Regional about Regional Sanskrit?

For nearly an entire millennium, Sanskrit served as what Sheldon Pollock hascalled a cosmopolitan medium or Koinea vehicle for elite communicationand collective cultural imagination. Sanskrit poetry travelled and was enjoyedover a vast geographical expanse transcending the Indian subcontinent itself; atthe same time, kvya created its own internal, imaginative maps based largely on

9 Pollock, In Praise of Poets.



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the grand landscape of the ancient Epic.10 In a fundamental sense, these mapsconverged into a unified global vision of space, one which was meant preciselyto occlude local differences, or rather, to make the local universally standard.11

The term mrga, the Way, thus comes to signify this universal, classical vision ofSanskrit in contrast to the evolving local or vernacular cultures, known as dei.12

We now want to argue that second-millennium Sanskrit poetrywhich in factcomprises most of the existing kvya corpusis regional in the following primarysense: serving as an available and localised medium in each and every regionseparately, Sanskrit participated along with the vernaculars in the project ofinventing and elaborating distinctive regional cultures and identities. Far fromoccluding such regional distinctiveness or uniqueness, Sanskrit is now employed

precisely to articulate it. Take Vekadhvarins poem, discussed above, as a simpleexample. The two gandharvas frame or map by their flight plan a particular southIndian, mostly Tamil universenot merely, or even primarily, in hard geograph-ical terms but rather a patterned, re-imagined, accessible socio-aesthetic domain.Such a frame is meaningful to someone who lives within it, whose identity ispartly shaped by it. And all this is achieved here in Sanskrit.

Every Sanskrit poem is, of course, local or regional in that it was composed ina particular place by a poet speaking some vernacular as his or her mother tongue

(and writing in some local script). This is not, however, sufficient to qualify a textas regional in our terms. We are talking about a much deeper, vital relation to acrystallising regional traditiona relation we seek to define more precisely. Firstand foremost, a regional Sanskrit work aims at a local audience. It is not meant totravel the length and breadth of the cosmopolis, nor did it do so. In this, regionalpoetry differs from much erudite and theoretical Sanskrit composition of the secondmillennium, which does often reach the distant corners of the subcontinent, attimes with amazing speed.13 Sometimes we see this discrepancy in the works of asingle author, such as Appayya Dkita (sixteenth century), whose scholarly com-positions travelled far and wide and produced almost immediate responses through-out the subcontinent, while his devotional poetry, stotras, was strictly limited toTamil Nadu.14

The local audience we are positing is sensitive to a large series of textual features,operating simultaneously on various levels. Nearly all regional Sanskrit textsshow evidence of local linguistic materials, from the purely phonological stratum

to morphology, lexis and syntax. The latter domain is perhaps the most salient: awork like Nlakaha Dkitasnanda-sgara-stava,to take one random exampleout of many hundreds, often reads as if it had been conceived in a Tamil syntactic

10 Pollock, pp. 1038. Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out.11Ibid., p. 108.12 Note that this basic distinction between mrga and desi was later internalised by the regional

cultures themselves, so that each vernacular tradition has its own variants of Way and Place. SeeNarayana Rao and Shulman, Classical Telu

gu Poetry, p. 24ff.13 See, e.g., Minkowski, Nlakaha CaturdharasMantrakkhaa.14 See Bronner, Back to the Future and Hymns as Curriculam

.

.



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structure and with specific Tamil syntagma and idioms. In fact, we very muchlack a historically attuned, comprehensive view of Sanskrit syntax; each regionaltext deserves to be analysed from this perspective. In general, the very fixedness

of Sanskrit morphology seems to have allowed poets a remarkable freedom insyntax.15

Vernacular metrical schemes penetrate into Sanskrit, reflecting the metricalsensibility and expectations of the listeners. We limit ourselves to two clear ex-amples. The Telugu preference for consistently overriding theyati-breaks, so thatmusical hiatus and semantics become disjoined, works its way into Sanskrit textssuch as rdhara Vekaeas hendra Vilsa (late seventeenth century), asRaghavan has noticed in his introduction to this work.16 More generally, the

Dravidian technique of head-rhyme becomes prevalent in some Sanskrit poetrycomposed by speakers of south Indian languages such as kalya Malla in hisUdra-rghava and Nlakaha Dkita in his ivallrava. Here again, specific,focused studies are in order.

In broader socio-linguistic terms, we might ask ourselves to what extent theselinguistic entities that we think of as so neatly bounded and distinctSanskrit,Tamil, Telugu, etc.were truly separate in the minds of those who used them.Let us state this as an explicit problem or theme: in a polyglossic environment, in

which Sanskrit is one more available option for literary production and in whichthe vernacular has internalised huge chunks of Sanskrit just as Sanskrit has ab-sorbed significant patterns and modes of the vernacular, how are we to understandthe dynamics of the linguistic spectrum underlying a poets choice of language?

What pertains to the level of language and metrics also holds true when welook at thematics. Regional poetry is primarily concerned with issues or themesrooted in the culture, society and history of specific places. To take another examplefrom Nlakaha Dkita: his ivallrava is a mahkvya that narrates the64 amusements (ll, Tamil tiruviaiyal) of Sundarevara-iva. Not only is thisa Sanskrit kvya rendition of an earlier Tamil equivalent, but the events describedtake place only in Madurai and are replete with highly specific allusions to localtopography, cultic practice and historical traditionall centred on the Mnk-Sundarevara temple in the heart of the city. Moreover, one of the core narrativesof this poem focuses on the body of ancient Tamil poetry known as Sangamliterature and on several of its most famous poets (Nakkrar, Kapilar, and others).

Thus, as in the case of Vekadhvarins gandharvas, here we have a Sanskritkvya that deliberately positions itself in relation to a classical vernacular corpusand explores this relation in highly complex ways. No one who is outside theorbit of this local south-Tamil tradition, detailed knowledge of which the workassumes, can truly appreciate the poetry. Or let us state this in a positive way:texts such as Nlakaha Dkitas are meant to give voice in Sanskrit to a localworld with its own integrity, vitality and selectivity.

15 We thank Velcheru Narayana Rao for this observation.16 Raghavan, hendra Vilsa of rdhara Vekaea, p. 71.



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As stated earlier, such local constructions in Sanskrit sometimes explicitly setthemselves against classical or canonical images. Take, for example, one of theinvocation verses in this same work, the ivallrava:

anviya khinnam.

nigamn aenam na mnam

.

prathamam.

smarma/anviyamnam

.nigamair aeair

amba stumas te vayam aki-mnam//17

There was this old Fish, exhaustedfrom looking for all the Vedas.We dont think about him.What we praise,Mother,is what all the Vedas see,your twofish-eyes.

Formally, this poem is beautifully constructed of two closely parallel halves with

a shared, singular vocabulary. There is the old, puric tradition embodied byVius first avatar as the Fish; this tradition has been exhausted. The Fish wentsearching for the Vedas (in the depths of the sea); but the Vedas themselves searchfor a way to express the truth embodied in the fish-eyed goddess of Madurai,Mnki, the main deity of the temple where the ivallrava takes place. Thehierarchy is clear. The younger, regional configuration has superseded the oldercanon and displaced its pan-Indian mythic canvas in favour of a highly localisedritual system. We see this most clearly in the vocative amba strategically placed

at the start ofpda 4, thus turning the entire verse into a prayer to Mnk.Theme is an elastic term which easily extends into religious or theological

concerns of a regional nature, local politics and history, and specific social forma-tions. Regional Sanskrit works naturally and repeatedly address such topics in alltheir specificity. In addition, they organise themselves into a whole ecology oflocal genres, some shared with other regions. For example, in eastern India wefind aiva epigones of Jayadevas Gta-govinda. In Vijayanagara and Nyakatimes in the far south, a genre known as abhyudayatracing the daily ritual routine

of the king, hour by hourbecame popular. In the west of India, we find a wholeset of Sanskrit biographies dedicated to the emblematic eighteenth-century fig-ure of ivji. Then there are wider patterns or fashions in regional literary genressuch as sandea-kvya, discussed in detail below. Literary conventions emergingfrom a strong vernacular tradition make their way into local Sanskrit poetryforexample, the implicit references to the classical Tamil landscape divisions (tiai)in VekaanthasHam

.sasandea (see below). Regional poetic or aesthetic theories

17ivallrava 1.3.



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also seem to accompany literary production in Sanskrit no less than in the vernacu-lar: think, for example, of the Gauya Vaiava plays and their theory ofbhakti-rasa, or of the Andhra school ofalakra-stra and its interest in the sorcery of

syllables as played out in Andhra Sanskrit works such as the Udra-rghava,18

orof Kemendras idiosyncratic theory of metrics which he applies in his ownKashmir-flavoured poetry. Indeed, we could postulate that as a rule, wherever wefind a mature Sanskrit of place, we will also find a commensurate body of literarytheory unique to that area or at least some salient expression of metapoetic awareness.

Such localised poetic theories inevitably engage with classical or normativeschemes and categories, and with canonical theoreticians. Thus the novel idea ofbhakti-rasa developed in the writings of the Gauya Vaiavas taps into the do-

minant rasa discourse and aims at expanding its scope and meaning in relation topost-Caitanya literary output.19 This kind of intertextual conversation inevitablygenerates a certain intellectual or experiential depth. The same kind of complexityis an essential feature of what we are calling regional Sanskrit poetry. Local themes,conventions, genres, concepts, names and places are consistently plotted againstthe old, rich cosmopolitan set of images and patterns. Such intertextuality is nomere technical feature but lies at the very heart of the poetic enterprise that concernsus. As argued earlier, Sanskrit still allows a poet to transcend his or her parochial

context and reach out to a space shaped by a wider, inherited discourse. At thesame time, Sanskrit enables a skilled poet to condense into the space of a singleworkeven a single versean entire world of specific associations, contentsand meaning.

Here is another postulated theorem: Sanskrit of the place is almost by definitionan essay in depth, and as geographical extent shrinkssometimes to the space ofa single, minute royal courtthere is a corresponding deepening and complexity.The vast range of cosmopolitan Sanskrit has become almost vertical. But a certainfundamental tension accompanies this move. The poet has a choicehe or shecan always opt to maximise the universal aura of his poem at the expense of parti-cular localised traces. Or he or she may go for a vision and language that are en-tirely immersed in a micro-context. Each such choice has its promise and its price.Take, for example, the Kosala-bhosalya of ecalapati, a poet from Maratha-period Tanjavur (late eighteenth century). This work narrates in lea style thelife history of King hji together with that of Rma. One cannot really understand

this poem without detailed prior knowledge of hjis career, the names of thenotables in his court, and so on. The whole point of the exercise is to superimposethis historical biography on that of the mythic model; but the price is poetry that,like an inscription, cannot travel beyond the confines of hajis court. This isone, rather extreme example. This tension may go to the other extreme as well.

18 See Shulman, Notes on Camatkra.19 The interaction between Gauya alakra-stra and the canonical theory has been studied by

Gary Tubb, Poetry and Play in Kavikarapuras Play Within the Play; see also Haberman,Actingas a Way of Salvation.



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Thus an ostensibly localised work such as Gagdevis Madhurvijaya (mid-fourteenth century), even seen by some scholars as historical, in fact sacrificesnearly all its specificity on the altar of a neo-classical, heavily patterned idiom.

These features of regionalityaudience, language, theme and the inescapabletension bound up with their applicationall change, sometimes quite dramatically,in the course of the vernacular millennium. In short, each configuration has ahistory. Any attempt to study a given regional universe comprehensively mustaccount for this history. The present article has a less ambitious programme. Theremaining section offers an analysis of a single, particularly charming work whichplayed a pivotal role in the evolution of Sanskrit poetry in the Tamil country.

Clouds are History: Fly South

Vekaantha, better known by his title Vednta Deika (12681368), was one ofthe major Tamil rvaiava cryas, the seminal figure in the northern school(vaa-kaai) of south Indian rvaiavism in its period of orthodox synthesis andsystematisation. He was, as Fred Hardy has noted in a penetrating essay, at oncea highly gifted theologian-philosopher and a truly great poet.20 His poetic works

include a considerable output in Tamil, but his main oeuvre is a large corpus ofSanskrit poems, including two mahkvyas, a drama, and many smaller works. Inthis respectas a figure creative in both literary and erudite domains, in bothlanguages, firmly anchored in a particular regional and religious milieu and at thesame time connected to a trans-regional, classical idiomVekaantha could beseen as the founding figure for a new tradition of southern Sanskrit poetry.

He seems to have envisioned himself in some such light. At the end of his much-loved century of poems addressed to the goddess Compassion, the Dayataka,

he says:

pryo daye tvad-anubhva-mahmburauprcetasa-prabhtayo pi param

.

taa-sth/tatrvatram atala-spam plutam

.mm

padma-pate prahasanocitam driyeth//

Take all those classical poetsfrom Vlmki on.

They came all the way upto a vast ocean of experience,the experience that is you,but they never even dipped their toes.Compassion: shouldnt you pay mesome attention? Ijumped in,

20 Hardy, The Philosopher as Poet, p. 277. Hence his other title, kavi-trkika-sim.ha: see Appayya

Dkitas commentary to Ydavbhyudaya, introduction, v. 13.



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I cant touch bottom,Im drowning, and Godsits there smiling.21

Clearly, a rather new poetic ideal is articulated here, one based on experience be-fore all else. Even more striking, however, is the poets bold statement that effect-ively delimits the entire Sanskrit literary tradition, with its first inventor, Vlmki,and then places himself, Vekaantha, on the other side of this demarcation. Heis, it seems, the first poet to take the jump. For the first time, real depthindeed,infinite depthis possible. He is not disconnecting himself from the previous lit-erary canon, but rather transcending it. This notion is echoed by a southern tradition

according to which each of Vekaanthas Sanskrit works was composed in orderto out-do a major classical prototypethus the Ydavbhyudaya is a new andimprovedRaghuvam

.a, the Sakalpasryodaya recalls the Prabodhacandrodaya

of Kamira, and so on.22

Perhaps the outstanding example of this pairing is Vekaanthas answer toKlidsasMeghasandea [hereafter MS], theHam

.

sasandea or Goose-Messenger[hereafter HS].23 Klidsas text is arguably his strongest and most sustainedmetapoetic statement and, as such, serves as a template for subsequent meta-

poetic reflection. TheMeghasandea focuses from the start on the highly valuedprocess of poetic imagination and on the linguistic and figurative means that enableit. At the same time, through the imagined trajectory of the cloud sent as a love-messenger from Rmagiri in the south to the mythic Alak in the Himalayas, thepoet defines the core aesthetic geography of cosmopolitan Sanskrit. Klidsa fol-lows a consistent, logical pattern as the poem unfolds. His hero, the yaka-loverexiled to south India, directs the cloud step by step through a set of idealised loca-lities. Each of these is portrayed through descriptions of its natural setting, usuallyeroticised in elaborate figures, its deities and temples, and, above all, its women.The descriptions intensify continuously, even as the women develop from therelatively simple village girls in the early versestransforms of the Prakrit heroinesof Hlas Sattasai,some centuries before Klidsato the urbane sophisticatesof Ujjayin and beyond. These perfected vignettes supply later Sanskrit poetswith some of their richest and most accessible materials.

Although it has been argued that Klidsa was not the first to compose a

messenger-poem, there is no doubt that the tradition views the genre as we knowit as originating with the Meghasandea. We are, indeed, dealing with a genre,

21Dayataka 103.22 To vie with Meghasandea, Raghuvam

.

a, Kumrasam.

bhava, Bhravi and Mgha, he is said tohave composed Ham

.

sasandea, Yaduvam.

a (or Ydavbhyudaya), Mrasam.

bhava, Bhravi andPhalguna, but only the first two are now available (Krishnamachariar,History of Classical Sanskrit

Literature, p. 208).23 TheHam

.sasandea has been studied in detail by Hopkins, Lovers, Messengers, and Beloved,

Landscapes.



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quite possibly the most productive defined genre in all of Sanskrit poetry. Allsandea-kvyas are modelled after Klidsas: they are usually composed inmandkrnt metre like the Meghasandea; they share a set of standard topoi,

including the usual division into two halvesa description of the imagined journeyfollowed by the recognition of the recipient of the message and its deliveryaswell as a finer structure built around certain recurrent junctures.24 This genre hadan uneven course of evolution: beginning around the thirteenth century, we observea boom in the production ofsandea-kvyas spreading from south India to otherregions, and becoming a speciality of certain cultural zones such as Kerala. Wewill be arguing that this genre, more than any other, heralds the crystallisation ofan independent regional Sanskrit tradition.

Vekaanthas Ham.sasandea is a superb example of this trend. Like all the

other message-poems, it follows Klidsas prototype in metre, structure, sizeand narrative logic. Indeed, the first thing that strikes the reader is a truly astonish-ing parallelism on all levels, right down to that of actual phrasing. Vekaanthaemploys words, compounds, idioms and phrases that are immediately recognisableby anyone who knows the Meghasandea. Moreover, this linguistic repetitionoften comes in precisely parallel verses or even identical or nearly identical metrical

placement. Look at the first few verses: in verse 1 of HS, we findjanaka-tanay*,which famously appears in the first verse of MS; the sequence sa km(HS 1)repeats MS 2 (in both cases at the end of apda); verse 2 in both poems ends withdadara; knt-ledin HS 4 echoes kahlea-[praayini] in MS 3 (in bothcases at the opening ofpda 4), and so on. This is not a merely linguistic or for-mal matter; the familiar vocabulary with its set phrases serves closely correspond-ing expressive purposes and a shared, repeated progression. Thus the first versetells us of the male lovers separation from his beloved; in the second he catches

sight of a potential messenger; the fifth verse explicitly addresses the surprisingchoice of such a messenger (a cloud, a goose); and so on. This correspondence instructure does not always work on a verse-to-verse basis, but it consistently operatesat highly-charged junctures and transitions and, more generally, produces a patternof reflections, echoes and dense intertextuality. In short, the MS is a powerfulpresence throughout the HS, moment by moment; in a sense, it supplies the materialfrom which much of the HS is formed.

But such similarities should not mislead us. Vekaanthas acts of repetitionare often acts of meaningful and purposeful inversion. Take the simple, obviousmatter of directionality: both poems begin somewhere in the middle of the Indiansubcontinent (Rmagiri for the MS, Kikindh for HS); but the messengers go inopposite directions. The cloud heads north to Alak; the goose flies south to Lak.One reason for this distinction lies in another significant inversionthat of figureand ground. In the background of Klidsas basic situation of love-in-separation

24 See the list by Dharmagupta, a commentator on ukasandea, cited by Unni,Meghasandea ofKlidsa, 1621.



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we find the separated lovers of theRmyaa, Rma and St (also the messengerHanumn); several allusions, beginning with the very first verse, ensure that thelistener gets the intertextual point. This background reemerges as the central

framework for the HS. Here the isolated, lonely lover is, in fact, Rmajustafter Hanumn has brought him news of St, who will now become the projectedlistener of the message. The poem opens on the morning after an endless night,long as an eon (kalpkram), in which Rma has been processing whatHanumn has reported, and also making plans for immediate action. This is themoment when Rma sees the goose.

A whole set of further transformations follows from the above. The MS beginsat the onset of the monsoon and is dominated by the thematics of the rainy season.

The HS opens with the end of the monsoon and is pervaded by the imagery ofarad, autumn. Geese conventionally fly north to Mnasa Lake in Tibet duringthe monsoon and return south in arad. Thus while Klidsa repeatedly mentionsgeese as the companions of the north-bound cloud, Vekaantha inverts this re-lation: autumn clouds now accompany the south-bound goose. Indeed, he takespains to make this reversal unambiguous, explicit and conspicuous. For example,look at MS 11 and HS 13:

kartum.

yac ca prabhavati mahm ucchilndhrm avandhymtac chrutv te ravaa-subhagam

.

garjitam.

mnasotk/ kailsd bisa-kisalaya-ccheda-ptheyavantasampatsyante nabhasi bhavato rja-ham

.

s sahya// [MS 1.11]25

Your thunder alone makes the earth teemwith mushrooms. Its roar music to their ears,kindling a yearning for Lake Mnasa,

the regal geese, bearing bits of lotus fiberfor the journey, will keep you company in the skyall the way to Mount Kailsa.

skmkrair dinakara-karai kalpitnta-alkropnt atamakha-dhanu-ea-citrm

.ukena/

h pacd ucita-gatin vyun rja-ham.

sachatryeran nabhasi bhavata rad vrivh// [HS 1.13]

With the thin rays of sunlight as its ribsand bits of Indras rainbow to dye the clothat its outer rim, and Wind to carry it behind you,regal goose,at a stately pace, the autumn cloudswill turn themselves into a royal parasolthat fills the sky.

25 Citations from MS refer to the Kale, 1991 edition, with Mallinthas commentary.



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Perhaps the key to the formal affinity between the two verses lies in the sharedformula nabhasi bhavata, found in the identical slot in the middle of the fourth

pda. It seems as if Vekaantha planted this phrase with the express aim of

calling attention to the close inversion: in Klidsas verse the sky is dominatedby the monsoon cloud with its resonant thunder, which fertilises the entire earthand signals to the geese that it is time to pack for their journey; in the HS, thissame royal goose, rjaham

.

sa, takes over the sky as if he were a real king progres-sing in ritual procession through his kingdom. The goose occupies the centre withthe cloud enfolding him from all sides, driven from behind by the wind, a servantbearing the regal parasol. Note that Klidsas image of the convex mushroomhas expanded to gigantic proportions as the imagined heavenly parasol, chatra

appearing here as an eloquent denominative verb at the juncture ofpda 4. Eventhe bits of Indras rainbow are lifted from the MS (verse 15), which has a bit ofIndras rainbow (dhanu-khaam khaalasya) emerging from an anthill,valmkgra, and serving to dye the dark cloud with many colours.

There is much more to this technique of calling attention to what we mightterm inversiveor even subversiveintertextual reference. Clouds, for instance,turn up repeatedly, and never innocently, in the HS. Consider the famous meta-poetic verse at the opening of the MS where the narrator deliberately commentson the sheer madness of the conceit of sending a cloud as a messenger:

dhma-jyoti-salila-marutm.

sam.

nipta kva meghasanderth kva pau-karaai pribhi prpay/ity autsukyd aparigaayan guhyakas tam

.

yaycekmrt hi praaya-kpa cetancetaneu//1.5

Smoke, light, water and wind put together:what does a cloud have to do with such a serious matter?Doesnt it take a person, fully awake, to deliver a message?But the Yaka didnt think it through when he made his request.Lovers, if theyre miserable enough, cant tellthe living from the still.

Here is Vekaanthas response to the same challenge:

ktv tasmin bahumatim asau bhyasm janeydghonmda praaya-padavm

.

prpa vrtnabhije/vileea kubhita-manasm

.megha-aila-drumdau

yca-dainyam.

bhavati kim uta kvpi sam.

vedanrhe//1.5

A goose knows nothing of messages, yetRma approached him with great respect.

(Not even Hanumn received such honour.)In his utter madness, he found a way



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into the birds heart. People shaken by separationare reduced to begging help from clouds,mountains, trees, and so onto say nothing

of sentient creatures.We have the same question, the same logical structure, the same poetic figure(arthntara-nysa); some of the vocabulary is shared; even the verse number is thesame. And yetthere is a subtle difference in tone. For all the pathos, Vekaanthasverse also makes us smile. We happen to know of a case where someone askedeven a cloud to be his messenger. In fact, as will become clear later on, this obvi-ous reference to the famous intertext also includes a slight dig. Rmas choice

of messenger, we are told, actually makes better sense. And in the course of noticingthis similarity and this difference, including the irony that accompanies the inter-textual conversation, one begins to sense the opening up of a certain unfamiliar,promising space.

The irony soon deepens. Clouds keep turning up in pointed reference. Look atverse 1.10:

vclnm iva jaa-dhiym.

sat-kavau dra-yte

kailsya tvayi gatavati kbatm ritnm/sammodas te pathi pariamec candrakair ujjhitnm.

meghpye vipina-ikhinm.

vkya vcam.

-yamatvam//

In the absence of any noble bird,these bird-brained peacocksnever shut up. They go mad.It happened when you took off

for Kailsa. But clouds are history.As you make your way south,youll have the utter pleasureof seeing these peacocks, shorn of their feathersand silent.

Sanskrit peacocks screech and dance in ecstasy as soon as they catch sight of themonsoon clouds. The autumn, however, is the season of Sanskrit geese. This verse

seemingly repeats this convention in celebrating the relief one gets when the rainssubside and the peacocks stop their annoying clamour.26 However, there is another,highly conspicuous linguistic register operating in the verse. Sat-kavi, noble bird(inpda 1) normally means a good poetso, in the absence of such a poet, thevipina-ikhina or boorish Brahmins, have a field day, chattering idiocies thatdeafen the ears. They only quieten down when the cloudsor the Cloudretreatand the true poet returns. Suddenly they are shorn of their phony feathers, and thereal poet can enjoy their naked silence.

26Kvydara of Dain, 3. 332, example ofVirodha.



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Once again Vekaantha highlights an inversion in space and time. We are, ineffect, in a sequel to the MS; the season has changed from monsoon to autumn,and the goose is now headed back south after his north-bound flight during the

rains. On top of this change we have a rather direct attack on a whole crowd oflousy poets, a common topos in kvya.27 However, the most striking feature ofthis verse is the strategically placed phrase meghpye, literally at the departureof the cloud, at the start ofpda 4always the point of greatest emphasis in aTamil poemwhich quite explicitly names the significant intertext and at thesame time sets it aside. Klidsa and his cloud are history. So are the chatterbox-poets who followed in Klidsas path, like the peacocks that welcome the cloud-messenger in his MS (1.23, 1.35). (Recall Vekaanthas boast about plunging

into the ocean that none of his predecessors dared enter.) It is as if Vekaanthawere telling us that the MS had to be superseded so that his own compositioncould emerge in all its uniqueness. The Cloud is gone, although its absence remainsas a constant presence.

Pointed references to clouds continue to appear throughout the poem. For in-stance, the goose is given a choice of two routes to Lakone, the easy and safeone along the western coast of India (Kerala), is nonetheless nitya-vara, alwaysrainy, and thus, like everything else that has to do with clouds, to be avoided

(1.18). In verse 1.50 the auspicious Pya land is well-watered by clouds thatare nervous because they remember the fact that they were once imprisoned by alocal king (as we know from the Madurai tradition).28 Verse 4 of the second sec-tion (vsa) describes the tears shed by the women of heaven, who have beenabducted and imprisoned by Rvaa, at a moment defined as vyapagata-ghanethe disappearance of the clouds. And so onwe will cite another striking exampleshortly. A certain fascination with clouds and the rainy season, usually mentionedwith a somewhat ironic twist or a slight edge, comes through in a manner perhapsemblematic of the wider intertextual relationship and sustains the general inversionof season and direction.

Deep Space and Heavy Time

Of the two possible routes that Rma outlines for the goose, the second (lesswater-soaked one) carries the messenger over the Tamil country; this trajectory is

dangerously fascinating, and Rma has to beg the goose not to lose too much timeenjoying its various attractions. Needless to say, his supplication has, for the poemsreaders or listeners, the opposite effect of Rmas intention; the subsequent verseswill linger over these very attractions, thereby fully mapping the imagined culturalspace that will displace Klidsas poetic geography.29 We begin to see that the

27 Eg. Vsavadatt of Subandhu, phik, 78; Kdambarof Ba, 56; in Telugu, this toposbecame a standard convention, the ku-kavi-ninda, at the opening ofkvya texts.

28 See, e.g., Tiruviaiyar

-puram of Paracoti Munivar, 19.29 See discussion by Hopkins, Lovers, Messengers.



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temporal and spatial shifts we have mentioned go hand-in-hand with the explicitthematisation of the southern (Tamil) region with a select set of landscapes, commu-nities, narratives, divinities and pilgrimage sites. Thus the goose is directed to fly

southeast towards Tirupati and Kahasti (the latter mentioned only by implication),and thence to Kcipuram (described at some length), the Chola region, rragamand Tiruccirppai, the no-mans land of Kaar bandits, Madurai, the TmrapariRiver basin, and finally the ocean that separates the Tamil zone from the ultimatedestination, Lak.

There are several things to be said about this route and the selectivity it implies.The flight of the goose weaves together elements belonging to distinct registersof regional identitythe major polities that came to be seen as constituting the

Tamil political order (Pallavas/Turas, Cholas and Pyas); the conventional-ised landscapes (tiai) of old Tamil poetry (thus the mountain region of Tirupatifits the ancient kurici landscape; the Kaar land is a direct transposition of the

plai wilderness; the Chola delta is the prototypical marutam zone; and theexquisite description of the southern coast is n ytal); an idealised social spectrumincluding peasant women, pearl-fishers, thieves, Yogis, warriors and gods; thegreat Vaiava temples beginning, appropriately, with Tirupati and moving throughthe Varadarja shrine at Kcipuram (Hastigiri) and rragam to Alakarmalai

outside Madurai. All this is plotted on the grid of major rivers, mountains andcities.

Here too, in the very heart of a specifically southern trajectory, Klidsasintertext retains its vitality. Consider the following verse:

iku-cchye kisalaya-mayam. talpam tasthum.

.sallpais tair mudita-manasm. li-samrakiknm/karnndhra-vyatikara-vat karbure gti-bhede

muhyantnm. madana-kaluam. maugdhyam svdayeth// 1.20

In the shade of the sugar-cane,lying on flower-beds,women who guard the paddy fields,happily chatting about this and that,get carried away singing songs spicedwith a mix of Kannada and Telugu.

You should savour their innocencewith its tinge of eros.

The deep structure of this verse is fashioned by reference to several verses in theMS which mention women from the geographical and social peripherytheinnocent Siddha women who think the cloud is a piece of the mountain torn offby the wind (1.14), the country girls (janapada-vadh) who work in the fields(1.16), the tribal women (vanacara-vadh) who live in mountain shacks (1.19),and the flower-pickers (pupa-lv) on the outskirts of Vidi who enjoy the shadeoffered by the cloud (chy-dna, 1.27). The latter theme is picked up directly by



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the opening compound of HS 1.20, iku-cchye. In all the messengers encounterswith these women, there is a clear erotic dimension; the cloud exchanges looksand liquids with the young women down below. The HS has its own set of encoun-

ters, similarly structured, but with a very different flavour (including a somewhatpuritanical note, appropriate to the orthodox rvaiava matrix).However, the transformation is, as always, no mere technicality. Klidsa has

a vision of the central path or way, mrga, from its periphery in the Deccan plateauin the south via its centre in Ujjayin and the plains to the northern mountainranges. It is even possible that the starting point in the Deccan is implicitly associ-ated, in a metapoetic perspective, with the Prakrit poetry of Hla and his successors.For Vekaantha by contrast, the mrga has been radically reconfigured, oriented

southwards, and made to incorporate a very different conceptual scheme of centreand peripheryone that specifically includes the south Indian linguistic regionsand their poems. Recall that, to begin with, the goose was given a choice betweentwo itineraries (mrgau ... dvau), the western and the eastern, with a strong recom-mendation that he choose the latter. Here there is an explicit, realistic reference topopular songs in Telugu and Kannada, along with a suggestion that these languageshave their own genre-ecology (gti-bheda). But the full resonance of such a choice,or of such observations, depends on the juxtaposition with Kalidasas northernroute and its social landscape. The result is a verse which is not merely beautifulin its own rightnote the subtle and moving progression from iku-, sugarcane,at the very beginning to the optative verb of savouring, svdayeth, at the veryendbut also saturated with overtones emanating from Klidsas poem. In short,we have a perfectly constructed vignette articulated in the classical syntactic-metrical patterns of the MS, which is at once convincingly local in topos andimage and yet expanded vertically and topologically. It is almost as if a vector

that begins somewhere near Tirupati spins northwards to include the outskirts ofVidi, which it enfolds in its arc, before turning back to the Tamil country. Weare looking at but one small example; such spatial effects, with their inherent dy-namism and depth, pervade the HS.

This spatial depth is constantly accompanied by similar temporal complexities.Let us think, for a moment, about the time-frame of Klidsas MS: the poem un-folds in what appears to be an extended present moment, in which the poet imaginestheyaka hero imagining the route of his cloud-messenger in what is primarily a

forward movement into the projected future. One simple indication of this modeis the frequent use of the optative and the future. Of course, this poetic present isenriched by continuous reference to a familiar mythic past, which has left concreteremnants at nearly every stage of the journey. Thus the footprints of Rma areevident on the slopes of Rmagiri (MS 1.12) where the water of the mountainstreams is still fragrant with the memory of Sts bathing (1.1); at Ujjayin, ivastava dance is just about to begin as evening falls (1.37); the battlefield of

Kuruketra bears even now the arrows shot by Arjuna in the Mahbhrata war(1.51); and as the cloud reaches the Himalayan region, he can still see the damage



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that Rvaa inflicted on Mount Kailsa by lifting and shaking it with his manyarms (1.61). This mythic past becomes an integral part of present experience; butthe temporal trajectory is, nonetheless, relatively simple.

Not so in the HS. Here we have at least two, sometimes conflicting, presenttenses. The poet, like Klidsa, composes his work and communicates to us inhis own poetic present reality. The local world he portrays is, after all, one heknows intimately, from direct experience. Again and again the reader hears aboutsomething that he or she recognises as corresponding to a familiar reality. But thepoems imagined present is retrojected precisely into that mythic past that informsthe MS. We are back with Rma, at a very specific juncture in the Rmayanarrativethe morning after the long night following Hanumns return from

Lak. From this point in time, the poems hero or speaker, Rma, projects a fu-ture flight-plan and arrival, including a message to St which promises futureevents that we, the listeners, know to be far in the past (and to have been describedin later sections of the epic itself). Rma assures St that he will soon kill Rvaaand rescue her. But these concurrent presents are only the external contours forthe dizzying temporal movements of this text. For one thing, Klidsas intertext,which we have seen to be continuously and explicitly active within the HS, is

positioned somewhere between the two present modes we have just described,referring simultaneously back to the Rmyaa and, as it were, forward to thegoose.

Take one striking example:

lakm-vidyul-lalita-vapuam. tatra kruya-pram.m bhais tvam

.

marakata-il-mecakam. vkya megham/uddhair nityam. paricita-padas tvdair deva-ham.sair

ham.s-bhtas sa khalu bhavatm anvavygra-janm//1.33

Lakm, a streak of lightning, graces a bodyfull of compassion and dark as emerald.Dont be afraid when you seea cloud, at whose feetgreat seers, birds of your feather,cluster in worship.

Its a cloud turned goosethe firstborn in your line.

If it sounds strange to you, so it should. The cloud in question, at least on onelevel, is the dark icon of Varadarja-svmi/Viu in Kcipuram, where ourtravelling goose arrives as a pilgrim at Rmas suggestion. On the breast of thisimage we find Lakm, who is thus appropriately likened to a flash of lightning

within the dark monsoon cloud. At the feet of this emerald-coloured Viu lie themost accomplished rvaiava devotees, the nitya-sris, who have been granted



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the honorific title ofdeva-ham.sa, heavenly geese (ham

.sa orparamaham

.sa are

common titles for advanced ascetics or seers). What is more, the cloud-cum-godhimself has become yet another goose in the sense that he is identical to the supreme

reality, referred to already in the Upaniads by this same word, ham.sa. As such,he must be the First Goose, and hence the founder of the entire species of which

our messenger is the latest representative. So, as the modern commentatorS. Narayana Iyengar remarks, there are three conspicuous meanings for the wordham

.

sa in this one verse: a swan [sic], a pure ascetic, [and] the Supreme Spirit.30

But there is a fourth one as well: for clearly Klidsas cloud is once again invokedin the most direct metapoetic manner conceivable. The cloud-messenger has trulybecome a goose, after serving as the firstborn in the line or genre of messenger-

poems.Consider the breathtaking temporal shifts in this verse. Rma directs the gooseto another form of himself. The goose goes there only to find a ham

.sa already

(potentially) there. The cloud is both history and futurealso present. Even onthe most basic linguistic level, these temporal modes are conflated: the goosesees (vkya) the cloud (in the absolutive), and is told not to be afraid (imperativedirected towards the future, m bhai), for the cloud has already become, inthe past, a goose (ham

.

s-bhta). But this act of becoming in effect states very

strongly Ve.nkaanthas claim for poetic superiorityat the same time acknow-ledging the enormous debt he owes to the original model. It is also very strikingthat a description of the current iconic image of the god in Kcipuram is given tous as a future projection from out of the past which is the poems present.

Sometimes this kind of temporal looping is even more intricate. Consider thefollowing description of the rraga-vimna situated on the edge of the Candra-pukari tank in rragam:

tre tasy viracita-padam.

sdhubhis sevyamnam.raddh-yogd vinamita-tanu ea-pham

.bhajeth/

yasminn asmat-kula-dhanatay saumya sketa-bhjasthnam

.bhvyam

.munibhir uditam

.rmato raga-dhmna//1.45

It was installed on the bank of this lake.It is worshipped by good people.Make sure you go there, too,

my friend,and bow in good faithto the ea Throne.For, as the sages have predicted,r Raganthanow stationed in Ayodhy,fortunately for my familywill come to sit thereone day.

30 Notes toHam.

sasandea 1955, pp. 3536.



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The verse starts off with a simple, linear progression of the ea Throne throughtime. It was once installed beside the Candra-pukari. It is currently being wor-shipped by sdhus. The goose would do well to pay it a visit on his route. All this

is reported from the perspective of the poetic present, i.e., Rmas perspective ashe sends the goose off to Lak. However, this poetic present stands in starkcontrast to the poets own present, in which the rraga-vimna is perfectly inplace as one of the two most significant Vaiava pilgrimage sites in the southernpeninsula. Vekaantha, like everyone in his intended audience, knows very wellhow the vimna arrived there: after having been kept for years in Ayodhy, it wasgiven by Rma to Vibhaa as a gift in return for his help and loyalty in theLak war. Vibhaa tried to take it south to Lak, but on the way he put it

down in rragam in order to celebrate a festival with the Chola king. When hetried to pick it up, he could not move it; the god appeared and informed him thatthe vimna would remain permanently at rragam as a result oftapas performedby the Kver River, and that he himself intended to stay there, too.31 The onlyproblem is that this entire prior history of the vimna still lies in Rmas future.Rma has yet to meet Vibhaa, so the ea Throne should, in theory, be empty.Indeed, the vimna is still parked in Ayodhy, with the gods image inside it.

On the other hand, the goose has no reason to visit the rragam temple if it is

not the home of r Ragantha. So the two presents, with their separate needsand realities, conflict. A solution is found by positing Rmas prior knowledge,based on what the sages have predicted, of the future to be enacted at this site.This makes the goose a time-traveller who is, in effect, visiting the future. Andonce again he is about to visit the very person who is sending him offfor Rmais contemplating the future of another aspect of himself, an aspect he apparentlyvalues and even worships. He is directing the goose to perform a prophetic orproleptic act ofpj to his currently unoccupied throneto bow to someone whois not yet there. We might say that Rma is sending regards to other parts of him-self that will come into existence in a future time that we, the listeners or readers,already inhabit. In this sense, we are living in the future.

Note that the goose is moving in at least two temporal vectors at once. The poethas, as it were, sent him backwards into the past, while the hero of the poem pro-pels him into the future. Goose-time apparently is capable of such loops. Thinkagain of the relative temporality of this sandea-kvya vis--vis its model. It takes

place both before and after the MS. On the one hand, the Rmyaa lies in themythic memory of theyaka who, at one point, even compares his messenger, thecloud, to Rmas original messenger, Hanumn (2.40). Thus the HS throws usback in time to a point before the clouds missionindeed, to that point in timewhen Hanumns mission has just taken place. On the other hand, the HS is clearlya sequel to the MS and structures itself on all levels accordingly. Moreover, ittakes place, as the poet repeatedly tells us, when clouds have become history.

31rraga-mhtmya 79;Irmvatram of Kampan 6.38. 1720; Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths,pp. 4950.



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To complicate matters still further, in the very next verse of the HS Rmatells the goose that he, Rma, is full of longing for this primordial divinity lyingon ea, like an emerald in a box, together with the daughter of the ocean

(majym.

marakatam iva bhrjamnam.

tad-anta/ ceto dhvaty upahita-bhujam.

ea-bhoge aynam.

drghp

gam.

jaladhi-tanay-jvitam.

devam dyam,1.46). The box containing the emerald is this same rraga vimnastill not inplace in the previous verse. St, who in reality is languishing in captivity inLak, far from Rma, is actually united with him in rragam, as Rma envisagesthe future shrine. The box is both there and not there, both empty and full. More-over, the theme of separation, embodied so dramatically by Rma and St at thispoint in the epic, has here been transposed into the longing that ( i) any devotee

feels for Viu at rragam; and (ii) that Viu himself, in his Rma avatar, feelsfor this other, perhaps fuller, yet fully localised part of himself.

Time, in this text, is heavily saturated with multi-directional movement. Itenfolds the reader in loop after loop. This temporal richness is in part an outcomeof the coming together of precisely those three intertextual canons with which,following Vekadhvarin, we began this essaythe great Sanskrit epics (herethe story of Rma), the Sanskrit classics (Klidsas MS), and vernacular poetry

(in this case the sthala-puras of temples like Varadarja-svmi at Kcipuramor r Raga-ntha as well as Kampans Irmvatram and, less explicitly, thervaiava Tamil Divya-prabandham). When all three layers mix in a singlepoetic moment, immense depth becomes possible in terms of both time and space.Among other things, this depth enables a certain freedom; the skilled poet takesus very far, and in radically different directions simultaneouslyand this at atime when the actual circulation of such works is becoming increasingly restrictedin sheer geographic terms. We postulate that such vertical effects, with their as-

tonishing temporal and spatial richness, are characteristic of regional Sanskritpoetry. In the particular case we are examining, this richness can also serve a fur-ther experiential, religious purpose. The fractured, highly complex, multi-directionaltemporality opened up for the listener changes his or her awareness and therebysituates this listener within, or closer to, the competing, richly interwoven, paradox-ically concurrent temporal dimensions of the god himself.

We Live Together in a Single Home

Vekaanthas change of directionthe southward thrustleads to one complica-tion. The poem reaches its culmination in Lak, as imagined by Rma, a Lakconstructed by the poet in exact parallel to Klidsas Himalayan Alak. Verse byverse, the second half of the HS takes up verbal, figurative and syntactic patternsfrom the second half of the MS. For Klidsa, Alak is in all respects the highestpointin terms of physical elevation, divine presences and emotional intensity.

This is where the yaki beloved lives, and iva, too, Klidsas ia-devat,is personally present there. For Vekaantha, things are not so straightforward.



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True, Lak is a site of remarkable beauty and opulence and that of Sts enforcedresidence. Like Alak, Lak is situated on the slopes of a jewelled mountain(Suvela); it rivals the heavenly city of the gods in brilliance and fragrance; in fact,

elements of that divine city, such as the Mandra trees or the gods wives andcourtesans, have been physically transplanted to Lak by Rvaa, the half-brotherof Kubera, who rules the sister-city of Alak.

However, once again a surprising complexity comes through. The emotionalclimax of the HS unfolds in a setting primarily associated with the moral depravityof the Rkasa demons. Lak is the Rksa.sa capital of the world. Thus, from thevery beginning of the poem, some ambivalence colours the destination:

sthnair divyair upacita-gum.

candanraya-ramym.mukt-stim

.malaya-marutm

.mtaram

.dakim/

asmat-prtyai janaka-tanay-jvitrtham.

ca gacchannekam

.

raka-padam iti sakhe doa-leam.

saheth//1.9

Fly to the South.It has plenty of fantastic temples.Beautiful sandalwood groves.

Its the birthplace of pearlsand the mother of the Malaya breeze.Go there and save the life of Janakas daughter.Do it for me.Theres only one little thing I should mention:Its crawling with Rkasas.

We have no doubt that the slightly ironic tone is entirely intentional. This poet is

both self-aware and open about the twist he gives to the journeys terminal stop.In fact, the irony and the ambivalence become stronger in the second half of thepoem, when the goose is given specific directions about Lak. Each verse is finelynuanced to accommodate this complexity. To give one example, Lak has bothbeen reduced to ash (by Hanumns burning tail, a fire that is a transposition ofSts fiery grief: maithil-oka-vahner bhasm-bhtm

.

pavana-tanaya-snehinpvakena) and instantly rebuilt by the architect of the gods, Vivakarman, whoserestoration of the city outdoes his earlier architectural achievements (pratydia-

prathama-racanam, 2.5).32 Or take the verse that immediately follows:

madhye tasy niicara-pates sadma ruddhntarikam.

yugmam.

neyair divi sumanasm.

. sevyamnam.

vimnai/krgram

.vibudha-sudm

.vkamo vicitram

.

oka-prti-vyatikaravatm.

vakyase citta-vttim// 2.6

32 Note that Rma assumes that Vivakarman and others will have rebuiltthe city, sam.vidhsyanti

a simple future clearly meant as predictive or future perfect, a common Tamil construction.



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At the centre of town, youll seethe palace of the demon king, so highit dominates the sky.

Outside are parked his fancydouble-seated private jets,stolen from the gods.Nearby is the splendid prisonwhere the women of heaven are inmates.Dont be surprised if you feel confusedby a mixture of sorrow and fascination.

The mixture is real and consistent and contrasts with the wholly positive imageof Alak in the MS. At the same time, the parallelism persists (note that the vimna-jets, including the most famous of them all, the Pupaka-vimna, actually belongto Kubera of Alak). Lak seems to be physically reaching up towards heaven;Rvaas tall mansion is a replica of the skyscrapers (abhram

.-lihgr prsd,

2.1) in Klidsas Alak. Still, the irony is somewhat tongue in cheek, and theambivalence subsides as the poem zooms in on St and the message is delivered.

Let us sample two verses from the end of the masterful, profound depiction ofSts state, which begins with the verb manyeI think she must be ....inverse 2.13 and runs through verse 2.22:

vaktum.

mrgam.

kila vasumatm.

jagmuas tat-padbjdmajrasya tvad-upama-ruter dakiasysya tulyam/akrhe caraa-kamale mat-kareopadheyam

.

vmam.

kh-ikhara-nihitam.

vkya gham.

viam//2.20

This right anklet of hersthe one that rings likeyourvoicewalked away from her footand came down to earth as if to show methe way. Its twinthe one that Ishould be tying to her lotus-like footwhen it comes to rest on my lap

is hidden high on a branch above her.Im sure that whenever she looks at it,her heart sinks.

Follow the movement. We now have two eloquent messengersthe goose,whose call recalls the tingling of Sts anklets (as we were informed already inverse 1.3, tan-majra-pratima-ninada), and the right anklet itself, which Stcast off from her foot while being kidnapped by Rvaa in order to give Rma

some sign of her whereabouts. These messengers fly off in opposite directions.The anklet walked away towards Rma, somewhere over Kikindh in the Deccan;



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the goose will shortly be taking off in a southerly direction. We also have twoankletsthe right one, which Rma holds in his hand, restored to him by Sugrva,and the left one that is secretly kept by St, hidden on a branch of the im

.

ap

tree in Lak under which she is kept captive. Rma looks down at his anklet;St looks up at hers. Moreover, each anklet belongs to a different temporaldirection. The right one points backwards in time to the moment of kidnapping;the left one embodies the future moment of intimate reunion, when Rma will tieit to Sts foot.33 Taken together, we have in concrete form both separation andunion, despair and hope. To our taste, this verse has a power, derived from theamazing condensation of contrastive vectors, that goes beyond even Klidsasbeautiful description of theyakiin Alak.

Rmas ultimate visualisation of St in this series takes us inwards to herintensevisualisation of him:

ceto-vttim.

amayati bahis srva-bhaume nirodhemayy ekasmin praihita-dhiyam

.mnmathengamena/

abhyasyantm an-itara-juo bhvany prakartsvntenntar-vilaya-mdun nirvikalpam

.samdhim//2.22

Im sure shes practising Yogacalming the mind by blocking everything external,focusing her awareness entirely on one thing:me.The text she follows is the Scripture of Love.In the vast power of her imaginationwhich has no other object,

her heart melting,she is dissolvinginto the deepest place.

Was all the journey but a circle? Is it at all necessary? Rma is, in fact, deep insideSt and has always been there. It is perhaps only a question of her finding himtherefollowing the right scripture. When she does, in his imagination of herimagining him, the union or even fusion is already complete.

This realisation finds its ultimate expression in verse 2.40, perhaps the mostbeautiful of the entire poem, clearly meant to be paired with Klidsas famousMS 2.42. For the sake of comparison, we first translate Klidsas verse:

agengam.

pratanu tanun gha-taptena taptam.

ssrerudrutam aviratotkaham utkahitena/

33 This contrasting temporality is nicely stated by the modal upadheyamthe left anklet shouldbe tied by Rma in the hoped-for, envisaged future.



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uocchvsam.

samadhikatarocchvsin dravartsakalpais te viati vidhin vairin ruddha-mrga// MS 2.42

Body into body,

the lean to the leaner,fierce fire into fire,tears into flowing tears,longing into ceaseless longing,heavy sigh to endless sigh:he who is farenters you

in his thoughts,while hostile fate blocks his path.

Now Vekaanthas creative equivalent to this powerful poem:

deha-sparam.

malaya-pavane di-sambhedam indaudhmaikatvam

.

jagati bhuvi cbhinna-paryaka-yogam/tr-citre viyati vitatim

.rvitnasya payan

dr-bhtm.

sutanu vidhin tvm aham.

nirvimi//2.40

Our bodies touchin the southern wind.Our eyes meetin the moon.We live together in a single homethe world, and the earth

is the one bed we share.The sky scattered with starsis a canopy stretched above us.Think of this, my lean beauty:However far awayyou may be,I still find my wayinto you.

The echoes are insistent, as we expect them to be. Where Klidsa begins withaga, the body, Vekaantha begins with a synonym, deha. The intense interweav-ing of the Klidsa verse is clearly also the theme in Vekaanthas. Both versesend with a complaint against fate, vidhi, which is responsible for the distance sep-arating the lovers (dravart, dr-bht). Yet the contrast is no less striking.Look, for example, at the word order of the finalpda: Klidsa moves from the

imagined fusion embodied in the verb viati, enters, to the harsh reality of blockage



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(ruddha-mrga). Vekaantha builds up, in a fantastic crescendo, to the finalverb nirvimi, I enter, delight in, make love to. On the way up we have thejuxtaposed pronounsinseparably conjoined, almost an irregular compound or

an Upaniadic-style mahvkyatvm aham, I-you. You could say that thismoment is one of the crucial points of the entire text. Remember that this is Godspeaking to his beloved, with whom he does, truly, share a single universe, despitethe un-deniable experience of distance.

Both poems envisage the lovers unionbut how different it is! For Klidsa,the togetherness can come about only in the imagination (sakalpai), whichstands to be frustrated or contradicted by reality. Once again we are in a metapoeticmode; the author, at the very end of his work, calls attention to the liberating power

of poetic fancy. But in the HS, with its concrete reference to all the componentsof a physical world, the union is factual and real. Moreover, the very simplicity ofreferenceto the wind, the moon, the earth, the starsboth domesticates andendears. We, the listeners, also experience a magical intimacy with the divine.We, too, live in his home and sleep in his bed.

One can also read this exquisite verse as a condensed culmination of this entirepoetic exercise. The whole movement into a local, southern reality constantlydeepened by the complex intertextual echoes we have analysed finally opens up

to the greatest (deepest) expanse of all. The entire universe is present in this verse.Vekaantha has found a path that allows him, however deeply embedded he isin his local context, to go wherever he wants, as far as he wants. The Path, mrga,has been superimposed on the Place, dea. Let us state the driving, paradoxicalprinciple as boldly as possible: the greater the localisation, the wider the scope.

What is Good for the Goose

Recently Sheldon Pollock has argued that Sanskrit died as a vital literary mediumsometime around the turn of the second millennium A.D.at dates that vary indifferent regions and cultural formationsand that

Sanskrit literature ended when it became a practice of repetition and not renewal,when the writers themselves no longer evinced commitment to a central valueof the tradition and a feature that defined literature itself: the ability to make

literary newness, the capacity, as a great Kashmiri writer put it to continuallyreimagine the world.

Or, this time in relation to the Sanskrit production at the Vijayanagara court in thesixteenth century:

Something elsesomething terribly importantabout Sanskrit literature hereseems moribund. The realm of experience for which Sanskrit could speak lit-

erarily had palpably shrunk, as if somehow human life beyond the imperial



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stage had outgrown Sanskrit and required a vernacular voice. This shrinkageaccelerated throughout the medieval period, leaving the concerns of empire,and finally the concerns of heaven, as the sole thematics.34

We disagree.We have looked mostly at one exampleand we are very far from exhausting

it. But what is good for the goose may be good for a whole gaggle of ganders. Noone would claim that all second-millennium Sanskrit kvyas are masterpieces.Some, however, clearly are. Beyond this question of aesthetic judgement, and be-yond the sheer impressive volume of Sanskrit production over this long period,there are certain analytic features of historical consequence that deserve to be

stated.First among them is the issue of newness. A work like the HS is obviously inno sense a dull repetition of an earlier model. As we have seen, it uses the inter-textual component in order to reach a powerful new goalall this with awareness,irony and a sense of humour. There is also the matter of scope or, if one prefers, ofboldness, originality and intensity. On all these accounts, Vekaantha comesthrough as a master. However, even this statement fails to capture the radicaldepth of innovation. Depth, however, is a metaphor. It is possible to spell out

what we mean by it.We experience depth in reading when we meet with certain types of complexities

for example, when the mind is thrown backwards and forwards simultaneously,or when it swerves, swivels, or loops as it follows the paradoxical directionalitiesof time and space. Depth results from the superimposition of the universal on theparticular, of the macro on the micro, and from their strong interweaving. Depthis created by the concurrent existence of several literary canons, activated andbrought into resonant relation with one another. Such activation anticipates anaudience well-versed in and sensitive to the rich intertexts. It also reflects theorganic fusion of scholar and poettwo roles that were occasionally, but notcommonly, conflated in earlier periods. In the literature we are examining, such amerger is perhaps normative. Depth is also a dependable product of repetition,which always tends towards variation, not mechanical reproduction. Indeed, variantrepetition is one prominent technique for achieving defamiliarisation or estrange-ment within even the most intimately familiar literary or cultural patterns. Depth

suggests movementor a particular kind of restlessnesswithin a space open toexperience, some of it probably unpredictable, waiting to be explored, perhapsincluding a strong personal element. This may be what Vekaantha means whenhe speaks of that vast ocean of experience (tvad-anubhva-mahmburi) andof his part in it: I jumped in, I cant touch bottom.

Within this range we find the peculiar expressive power of Sanskrit, still vitaland available throughout the second millennium in much of India. True, Sanskritis now but one of several literary options. But it brings with it unique assets such

34 Pollock, Sanskrit Literary Culture, pp. 95, 100.



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as the direct verbal and thematic continuities that transcend local contexts andthat, for that very reason, enable a powerful articulation of the regional in its truefullnesss. As we saw in the opening example from Vekadhvarin as well as in

the Ham.sasandea, such Sanskrit offers a wide-angled map, marked with theliving traces of the classical past, which serves as a starting point for the inversions,

reconfigurations, or distortions that go into the creation of a new, local sense ofself. This new self, of course, also expresses itself in the vernaculars, whichhave their own peculiar expressivity. Interacting with these vernaculars, Sanskritis itself continuously changing, stretching the boundaries of the sayable, thinkingnew thoughts, searching for ways to formulate this newness. As such, its historyremains to be studied. But that Sanskrit continues to be so productive, and so

inventive, speaks to the specificity of the space and freedom that it still offers. Infact, for reasons we have suggested, that space and freedom have, if anything,dramatically expanded.

References

Bronner, Yigal. Back to the Future: Appayya Dkitas Kuvalaynanda and the Rewriting of SanskritPoetics, Wiener Zeitschrift fr die Ku

nde Sdasians,vol. XLVIII, 2004, pp. 4779.. Hymns as Curricula: Appayya Dkitas Pedagogical Poetry, forthcoming.

Dayataka of Vednta Deika, Madras, 1970.Haberman, David.Acting as a Way of Salvation: A Study of Rgnuga Bhakti Sdhana, New York,

1988.Ham

.

sasandea of Vednta Deika. Edited with commentary by Swetaranyam Narayana Sastry, Englishnotes and translation by S. Narayana Iyengar, Madras, 1955.

Hopkins, S. Lovers, Messengers, and Beloved Landscapes: Sandeakvya in Comparative Perspective,International Journal of Hindu Studies, forthcoming.

Hardy, Friedhelm. The Philosopher as PoetA Study of Vedntadeikas Dehalstuti, Journal ofIndian Philosophy, vol. 7, 1979, pp. 277325.

Irmvatram of Kampan, Tiruvanmiyur, 1967.Kdambarof Babhaa, Delhi, 1985.Kvydara of Dain, Delhi, 1999.Krishnamachariar, M.History of Classical Sanskrit Literature, Delhi, 1970.

Meghadta of Klidsa, edited by M.R. Kale. Delhi, 1991.Minkowski, Chris. Nlakaha CaturdharasMantrakkhaa,Journal of the American Oriental

Society,vol. 122, 2002, pp. 32544.

Narayana Rao, Velcheru and David Shulman. Classical Telugu Poetry: An Anthology, Berkeley, 2002.Narayana Rao, Velcheru, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Symbols of Substance: Courtand State in Nyaka-Period Tamil Nadu, Delhi, 1992.

Pollock, Sheldon. In Praise of Poets: On the History and Function of the Kavipraam.

s, inAnandabharati: Dr. K. Krishnamoorthy Felicitation Volume, Mysore, 1995.

. Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out, in S. Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures inHistory, Berkeley, 2003.

Raghavan, V., ed. hendra Vilsa of rdhara Vekaea, Tanjore Saraswati Mahal Series No. 54,Trichi, 1952.

Shulman, David. Tamil Temple Myths, Princeton, 1980.. Notes on Camatkra, Indo-Iranica, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities,

forthcoming.

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bronner and shulman a cloud turned goose' : sanskrit in the vernacular millennium

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